OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automatic Chronic Degenerative Diseases Identification Using Enteric Nervous System Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Studies recently accomplished on the Enteric Nervous System have shown that chronic degenerative diseases affect the Enteric Glial Cells (EGC) and, thus, the development of recognition methods able to identify whether or not the EGC are affected by these type of diseases may be helpful in its diagnoses. In this work, we propose the use of pattern recognition and machine learning techniques to evaluate if a given animal EGC image was obtained from a healthy individual or one affect by a chronic degenerative disease. In the proposed approach, we have performed the classification task with handcrafted features and deep learning based techniques, also known as non-handcrafted features. The handcrafted features were obtained from the textural content of the ECG images using texture descriptors, such as the Local Binary Pattern (LBP). Moreover, the representation learning techniques employed in the approach are based on different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, such as AlexNet and VGG16, with and without transfer learning. The complementarity between the handcrafted and non-handcrafted features was also evaluated with late fusion techniques. The datasets of EGC images used in the experiments, which are also contributions of this paper, are composed of three different chronic degenerative diseases: Cancer, Diabetes Mellitus, and Rheumatoid Arthritis. The experimental results, supported by statistical analysis, shown that the proposed approach can distinguish healthy cells from the sick ones with a recognition rate of 89.30% (Rheumatoid Arthritis), 98.45% (Cancer), and 95.13% (Diabetes Mellitus), being achieved by combining classifiers obtained both feature scenarios.
Generalized Sorting with Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Generalized sorting problem, also known as sorting with forbidden comparisons, was first introduced by Huang et al. together with a randomized algorithm which requires $\tilde O(n^{3/2})$ probes. We study this problem with additional predictions for all pairs of allowed comparisons as input. We propose a randomized algorithm which uses $O(n \log n+w)$ probes with high probability and a deterministic algorithm which uses $O(nw)$ probes, where $w$ is the number of mistakes made by prediction.
Enhanced Balancing GAN: Minority-class Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are one of the most powerful generative models, but always require a large and balanced dataset to train. Traditional GANs are not applicable to generate minority-class images in a highly imbalanced dataset. Balancing GAN (BAGAN) is proposed to mitigate this problem, but it is unstable when images in different classes look similar, e.g. flowers and cells. In this work, we propose a supervised autoencoder with an intermediate embedding model to disperse the labeled latent vectors. With the improved autoencoder initialization, we also build an architecture of BAGAN with gradient penalty (BAGAN-GP). Our proposed model overcomes the unstable issue in original BAGAN and converges faster to high quality generations. Our model achieves high performance on the imbalanced scale-down version of MNIST Fashion, CIFAR-10, and one small-scale medical image dataset.
An edge-based architecture to support the execution of ambience intelligence tasks using the IoP paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

In an IoP environment, edge computing has been proposed to address the problems of resource limitations of edge devices such as smartphones as well as the high-latency, user privacy exposure and network bottleneck that the cloud computing platform solutions incur. This paper presents a context management framework comprised of sensors, mobile devices such as smartphones and an edge server to enable high performance, context-aware computing at the edge. Key features of this architecture include energy-efficient discovery of available sensors and edge services for the client, an automated mechanism for task planning and execution on the edge server, and a dynamic environment where new sensors and services may be added to the framework. A prototype of this architecture has been implemented, and an experimental evaluation using two computer vision tasks as example services is presented. Performance measurement shows that the execution of the example tasks performs quite well and the proposed framework is well suited for an edge-computing environment.
Temporal Smoothing for 3D Human Pose Estimation and Localization for Occluded People
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In multi-person pose estimation actors can be heavily occluded, even become fully invisible behind another person. While temporal methods can still predict a reasonable estimation for a temporarily disappeared pose using past and future frames, they exhibit large errors nevertheless. We present an energy minimization approach to generate smooth, valid trajectories in time, bridging gaps in visibility. We show that it is better than other interpolation based approaches and achieves state of the art results. In addition, we present the synthetic MuCo-Temp dataset, a temporal extension of the MuCo-3DHP dataset. Our code is made publicly available.
Rumor Detection on Twitter Using Multiloss Hierarchical BiLSTM with an Attenuation Factor
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Social media platforms such as Twitter have become a breeding ground for unverified information or rumors. These rumors can threaten people's health, endanger the economy, and affect the stability of a country. Many researchers have developed models to classify rumors using traditional machine learning or vanilla deep learning models. However, previous studies on rumor detection have achieved low precision and are time consuming. Inspired by the hierarchical model and multitask learning, a multiloss hierarchical BiLSTM model with an attenuation factor is proposed in this paper. The model is divided into two BiLSTM modules: post level and event level. By means of this hierarchical structure, the model can extract deep in-formation from limited quantities of text. Each module has a loss function that helps to learn bilateral features and reduce the training time. An attenuation fac-tor is added at the post level to increase the accuracy. The results on two rumor datasets demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than that of state-of-the-art machine learning and vanilla deep learning models.
Towards Measuring Place Function Similarity at Fine Spatial Granularity with Trajectory Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Modeling place functions from a computational perspective is a prevalent research topic. Trajectory embedding, as a neural-network-backed dimension reduction technology, allows the possibility to put places with similar social functions at close locations in the embedding space if the places share similar chronological context as part of a trajectory. The embedding similarity was previously proposed as a new metric for measuring the similarity of place functions. This study explores if this approach is meaningful for geographical units at a much smaller geographical granularity compared to previous studies. In addition, this study investigates if the geographical distance can influence the embedding similarity. The empirical evaluations based on a big vehicle trajectory data set confirm that the embedding similarity can be a metric proxy for place functions. However, the results also show that the embedding similarity is still bounded by the distance at the local scale.
Neural Coreference Resolution for Arabic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

No neural coreference resolver for Arabic exists, in fact we are not aware of any learning-based coreference resolver for Arabic since (Bjorkelund and Kuhn, 2014). In this paper, we introduce a coreference resolution system for Arabic based on Lee et al's end to end architecture combined with the Arabic version of bert and an external mention detector. As far as we know, this is the first neural coreference resolution system aimed specifically to Arabic, and it substantially outperforms the existing state of the art on OntoNotes 5.0 with a gain of 15.2 points conll F1. We also discuss the current limitations of the task for Arabic and possible approaches that can tackle these challenges.
Increasing Transmission Distance in THz systems with Erasure Coding and Auxiliary Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

We analyze whether the THz transmission distance can be extended with systematic linear network coding (sRLNC) and a low-bitrate additional channel. While various coding techniques have been proposed to mitigate issues of channel quality, and other techniques have used auxiliary channels to enable an effective THz transmission system configuration, their combination is new, and carries potential for significant improvements in transmission quality. Our specific solution is designed to complementing a generic low complexity FEC code by a low complexity erasure code (sRLNC), whereby channel coding is proposed to simultaneously send the native and coded data over two parallel channels, including one main THz channel and one auxiliary channel with comparably lower bitrate. We show theoretically that the proposed system can improve throughput, support higher modulation levels and transfer data over the longer distances with THz communications.
A Model-Based Testing Tool for Asynchronous Reactive Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Reactive systems are characterized by the interaction with the environment, where the exchange of the input and output stimuli, usually, occurs asynchronously. Systems of this nature, in general, require a rigorous testing activity over their developing process. Therefore model-based testing has been successfully applied over asynchronous reactive systems using Input Output Labeled Transition Systems (IOLTSs) as the basis. In this work we present a reactive testing tool to check conformance, generate test suites and run test cases using IOLTS models. Our tool can check whether the behavior of an implementation under test (IUT) complies with the behavior of its respective specification. We have implemented a classical conformance relation \ioco and a more general notion of conformance based on regular languages. Further, the tool provides a test suite generation in a black-box testing setting for finding faults over IUTs according to a specific domain. We have also described some case studies to probe the tool's functionalities and also to highlight a comparative analysis on both conformance approaches. Finally, we offer experiments to evaluate the performance of our tool using several scenarios.
Dark Reciprocal-Rank: Boosting Graph-Convolutional Self-Localization Network via Teacher-to-student Knowledge Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In visual robot self-localization, graph-based scene representation and matching have recently attracted research interest as robust and discriminative methods for selflocalization. Although effective, their computational and storage costs do not scale well to large-size environments. To alleviate this problem, we formulate self-localization as a graph classification problem and attempt to use the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) as a graph classification engine. A straightforward approach is to use visual feature descriptors that are employed by state-of-the-art self-localization systems, directly as graph node features. However, their superior performance in the original self-localization system may not necessarily be replicated in GCN-based self-localization. To address this issue, we introduce a novel teacher-to-student knowledge-transfer scheme based on rank matching, in which the reciprocal-rank vector output by an off-the-shelf state-of-the-art teacher self-localization model is used as the dark knowledge to transfer. Experiments indicate that the proposed graph-convolutional self-localization network can significantly outperform state-of-the-art self-localization systems, as well as the teacher classifier.
Graph based Clustering Algorithm for Social Community Transmission Prediction of COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

A system to model the spread of COVID-19 cases after lockdown has been proposed, to define new preventive measures based on hotspots, using the graph clustering algorithm. This method allows for more lenient measures in areas less prone to the virus spread. There exist methods to model the spread of the virus, by predicting the number of confirmed cases. But the proposed system focuses more on the preventive side of the solution from a geographical point of view, by predicting the areas or regions that may become hotspots for the virus in the near future. The fact that the virus can only be transmitted by being in close proximity to an already infected person, suggests that, the regions that can easily be reached from an existing hotspot, have a higher chance of becoming a new hotspot. Moreover, in smaller regions, even after strict provisions, positive cases have been found. To consider this fact, the geographic distance between the nearest hotspots can be used as a measure of likelihood of the region also becoming a hotspot. In this paper, a weighted graph of regions with the regions themselves as weighted nodes with weight of the nodes as the number of active cases and the distance as edge weights. The graph can be completely connected or connected based on a distance threshold. The nodes are the administrative, and the distance measure tells the possible transmission between separate communities. Using this data, the potential regions that can become hotspots can be predicted, and preventive measures can be devised.
Analyzing the Effect of Multi-task Learning for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Developing high-performing systems for detecting biomedical named entities has major implications. State-of-the-art deep-learning based solutions for entity recognition often require large annotated datasets, which is not available in the biomedical domain. Transfer learning and multi-task learning have been shown to improve performance for low-resource domains. However, the applications of these methods are relatively scarce in the biomedical domain, and a theoretical understanding of why these methods improve the performance is lacking. In this study, we performed an extensive analysis to understand the transferability between different biomedical entity datasets. We found useful measures to predict transferability between these datasets. Besides, we propose combining transfer learning and multi-task learning to improve the performance of biomedical named entity recognition systems, which is not applied before to the best of our knowledge.
Understanding Application-Level Caching in Web Applications: A Comprehensive Introduction and Survey of State-of-the-Art
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

A new form of caching, namely application-level caching, has been recently employed in web applications to improve their performance and increase scalability. It consists of the insertion of caching logic into the application base code to temporarily store processed content in memory, and then decrease the response time of web requests by reusing this content. However, caching at this level demands knowledge of the domain and application specificities to achieve caching benefits, given that this information supports decisions such as what and when to cache content. Developers thus must manually manage the cache, possibly with the help of existing libraries and frameworks. Given the increasing popularity of application-level caching, we thus provide a survey of approaches proposed in this context. We provide a comprehensive introduction to web caching and application-level caching, and present state-of-the-art work on designing, implementing and managing application-level caching. Our focus is not only on static solutions but also approaches that adaptively adjust caching solutions to avoid the gradual performance decay that caching can suffer over time. This survey can be used as a start point for researchers and developers, who aim to improve application-level caching or need guidance in designing application-level caching solutions, possibly with humans out-of-the-loop.
AI Marker-based Large-scale AI Literature Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

The knowledge contained in academic literature is interesting to mine. Inspired by the idea of molecular markers tracing in the field of biochemistry, three named entities, namely, methods, datasets and metrics are used as AI markers for AI literature. These entities can be used to trace the research process described in the bodies of papers, which opens up new perspectives for seeking and mining more valuable academic information. Firstly, the entity extraction model is used in this study to extract AI markers from large-scale AI literature. Secondly, original papers are traced for AI markers. Statistical and propagation analysis are performed based on tracing results. Finally, the co-occurrences of AI markers are used to achieve clustering. The evolution within method clusters and the influencing relationships amongst different research scene clusters are explored. The above-mentioned mining based on AI markers yields many meaningful discoveries. For example, the propagation of effective methods on the datasets is rapidly increasing with the development of time; effective methods proposed by China in recent years have increasing influence on other countries, whilst France is the opposite. Saliency detection, a classic computer vision research scene, is the least likely to be affected by other research scenes.
Neural Network Design: Learning from Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to optimize deep neural networks' architecture for better accuracy or smaller computational cost and has recently gained more research interests. Despite various successful approaches proposed to solve the NAS task, the landscape of it, along with its properties, are rarely investigated. In this paper, we argue for the necessity of studying the landscape property thereof and propose to use the so-called Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) techniques for this goal. Taking a broad set of designs of the deep convolutional network, we conduct extensive experimentation to obtain their performance. Based on our analysis of the experimental results, we observed high similarities between well-performing architecture designs, which is then used to significantly narrow the search space to improve the efficiency of any NAS algorithm. Moreover, we extract the ELA features over the NAS landscapes on three common image classification data sets, MNIST, Fashion, and CIFAR-10, which shows that the NAS landscape can be distinguished for those three data sets. Also, when comparing to the ELA features of the well-known Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking (BBOB) problem set, we found out that the NAS landscapes surprisingly form a new problem class on its own, which can be separated from all $24$ BBOB problems. Given this interesting observation, we, therefore, state the importance of further investigation on selecting an efficient optimizer for the NAS landscape as well as the necessity of augmenting the current benchmark problem set.
Institution-based Encoding and Verification of Simple UML State Machines in CASL/SPASS
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

This paper provides the first correct semantical representation of UML state-machines within the logical framework of an institution (previous attempts were flawed). A novel encoding of this representation into first-order logic enables symbolic analyses through a multitude of theorem-provers. UML state-machines are central to model-based systems-engineering. Till now, state-machine analysis has been mostly restricted to model checking, which for state-machines suffers heavily from the state-space explosion problem. Symbolic reasoning, as enabled and demonstrated here, provides a powerful alternative, which can deal with large or even infinite state spaces. Full proofs are given.
WLV-RIT at HASOC-Dravidian-CodeMix-FIRE2020: Offensive Language Identification in Code-switched YouTube Comments
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes the WLV-RIT entry to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) shared task 2020. The HASOC 2020 organizers provided participants with annotated datasets containing social media posts of code-mixed in Dravidian languages (Malayalam-English and Tamil-English). We participated in task 1: Offensive comment identification in Code-mixed Malayalam Youtube comments. In our methodology, we take advantage of available English data by applying cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and transfer learning to make predictions to Malayalam data. We further improve the results using various fine tuning strategies. Our system achieved 0.89 weighted average F1 score for the test set and it ranked 5th place out of 12 participants.
Human Leg Motion Tracking by Fusing IMUs and RGB Camera Data Using Extended Kalman Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Human motion capture is frequently used to study rehabilitation and clinical problems, as well as to provide realistic animation for the entertainment industry. IMU-based systems, as well as Marker-based motion tracking systems, are the most popular methods to track movement due to their low cost of implementation and lightweight. This paper proposes a quaternion-based Extended Kalman filter approach to recover the human leg segments motions with a set of IMU sensors data fused with camera-marker system data. In this paper, an Extended Kalman Filter approach is developed to fuse the data of two IMUs and one RGB camera for human leg motion tracking. Based on the complementary properties of the inertial sensors and camera-marker system, in the introduced new measurement model, the orientation data of the upper leg and the lower leg is updated through three measurement equations. The positioning of the human body is made possible by the tracked position of the pelvis joint by the camera marker system. A mathematical model has been utilized to estimate joints' depth in 2D images. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by an optical motion tracker system.
FusiformNet: Extracting Discriminative Facial Features on Different Levels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Over the last several years, research on facial recognition based on Deep Neural Network has evolved with approaches like task-specific loss functions, image normalization and augmentation, network architectures, etc. However, there have been few approaches with attention to how human faces differ from person to person. Premising that inter-personal differences are found both generally and locally on the human face, I propose FusiformNet, a novel framework for feature extraction that leverages the nature of discriminative facial features. Tested on Image-Unrestricted setting of Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark, this method achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 96.67% without labeled outside data, image augmentation, normalization, or special loss functions. Likewise, the method also performed on a par with previous state-of-the-arts when pre-trained on CASIA-WebFace dataset. Considering its ability to extract both general and local facial features, the utility of FusiformNet may not be limited to facial recognition but also extend to other DNN-based tasks.